Low Cut Connie Grapples With Belonging on New LP 'Livin in the USA'

Some two decades ago, Adam Weiner got stuck in the UK for an extra few weeks with nothing but a backpack, a guitar, and a bad case of the flu. He had no shows booked for his solo act, he was all out of money, desperately homesick and crashing on someone’s floor, when he wrote a spare, folky, Leonard Cohen-esque song called “Livin’ in England:”

Livin’ in England, baby
But it ain’t my home

It went away, into a file or drawer or some corner of his brain until last year. “I just felt like, ‘Oh, I know what this song needs to be now. I know what it's meant to be,’” he recalls. “It's been in the oven for 20 years. …It's ready.”

That song time-traveled a long way to this current moment of unrelenting fascism to become “Livin’ in the USA,” the title track of the latest album from Weiner’s ever-evolving rock and roll outfit Low Cut Connie, fittingly out one day before Fourth of July, via Weiner’s own DIY label Contender Records. Initially released last year as a solemn, soulful piano single, it has been revamped once again as an up-tempo, Connie-style banger:

My kinda people 
They ain't never gonna leave us alone…

Sleepin’ on the streets 
There's people dyin’ out there every day
Screamin’ in the midnite 
"Don't you take my child away"

You can pay some people 
To tell you what you wanna hear
Get a good lawyer 
Gonna make ‘em all disappear 

It’s a blistering, head-on collision with the current moment, and when it first came out, much of what he was singing about hadn’t yet come to fruition. “I'm not happy to say that there's a bunch of things on the album that now resonate more deeply than they did a year ago when I recorded them, because I kind of knew they would,” he says. “What I've seen in our country — on my phone, on TV, with my eyeballs, traveling, talking to people, what I've experienced and seen my neighbors going through — it just all went into that song. Everybody I know can relate to the words in that song, of just feeling, ‘What is this alien place that I'm in?’ And ‘I don't feel like I belong in this country or where it's headed,’ or ‘Maybe it doesn't want me,’ or whatever. So it was very easy to finish that song.” 

The idea of belonging is potent for a singular artist like Weiner, who has never fit squarely into any box and never set out to please the mainstream. An early manager discouraged him from playing piano at a South by Southwest showcase in the pre-Low Cut Connie days, afraid it’d give more Billy Joel than Jack White.